


Enough time for Phlegyas to draw breath

by acaramelmacchiato



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Bahorel does a quick walk of shame to get a hat, Burly naturally masculine romance poet Prouvaire, Gen, M/M, They talk about flowers, and Bahorel looks at Prouvaire's rippling whatevers, and that's the plot, obviously
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-29
Updated: 2013-04-29
Packaged: 2017-12-09 21:04:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/777962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acaramelmacchiato/pseuds/acaramelmacchiato
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kinkmeme prompt is: "Jehan/Bahorel- Jehan the burly naturally masculine romance poet."</p><p>Fill is much less exciting and much more about flowers and mortality salience and sex causing hats to become lost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Enough time for Phlegyas to draw breath

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt was inspired by this GLORIOUS TUMBLR POST: "Much as I love picturing jehan as this adorable waifish little romance poet, wouldn’t it be great if he was a REALLY BIG NATURALLY MASCULINE romance poet. Like this is jehan prouvaire HE COULD BREAK YOU WITH ONE HAND but he would never because he is a gentle soul who joined our cause for the women and children and wishes pain upon no man. He’d like to write a poem about your eyes would that be okay with you." 
> 
> So I mean obviously. 
> 
> Obviously.

  
Alone, Bahorel suspected they were all slightly different than they were in company. Either more or less grave, perhaps tired, introspective, childish or quiet. Jehan Prouvaire was an exception; Bahorel had snuck up on him unannounced enough to know that he did not retire his kindness, his capriciousness or his particular reverence for fragility.  
  
At six in the morning, with the dawning sun inadequate and distant, Bahorel unlocked the door to Prouvaire’s apartment and found him awake. He was in shirtsleeves and with his throat bare but subtly coarse with the beard that tried to grow in overnight, his window was uncovered, and he was lighting candles behind an heirloom porcelain vase of hyacinth flowers.  
  
“Close the door, would you,” Prouvaire said. His deep voice had a compelling, effortless sound and was used moderately -- even when he was speaking passionately he spoke quietly. The threat of thunder in that voice made him seem less frivolous than the rest of them, no matter what he was saying. Often, if you considered the content, it was frivolous; maybe a nice sentiment but something that would be ignored if it was written.  
  
Bahorel shrugged and obeyed.  
  
“I imagine I don’t want to know why you’re awake gardening at this hour,” he said. “But for free, I’ll tell you that you should have cut the wicks on those candles, or your flowers will act like tinder and bring this apartment down in flames. And you will be obliged to go to confession.”  
  
With a placid glare, Prouvaire moved the pitcher of hyacinth back slightly from the candles. The flames billowed and straightened, staining half the room with warm and inconstant light, and then fading into the gray sunrise.  
  
“There,” said Prouvaire, unfolding himself to stand back from his project. He scratched at the thickening beard on his jaw, folded his arms, and considered the scene.  
  
“I left my hat,” said Bahorel, explaining without being asked, and searching on instinct under Prouvaire’s untidy bed. “Last night, I know that I showed up here wearing it, and then I showed up at home without it, have you seen it?”  
  
“No,” said Prouvaire. “But it’s either around here somewhere, or it isn’t. Would you please stop talking. I want to think about this.”  
  
Thinking was something Prouvaire did a lot, and often he asked Bahorel for more silence during the process, saying, _Augustine writes that angels in paradise calmly read an eternal and unchanging word, which we see only in the dark clouds and through a glass, do you think they do it -- or mean for us to -- with some fellow crashing about in the background wondering how to get the wine open?_ To which Bahorel would invariably reply, _Then you get it open_ , and Jehan would uncork the bottle with an absent movement of his strong hands and sigh, despairing for all of them.  
  
Bahorel didn’t find the hat under the bed, but curiously he found it _in_ the bed, concealed by a pillow and a lump of blankets and, compounding the mystery, with one of his own socks wadded up inside. He took it and brushed it out, finding it undamaged, and put the sock in his pocket.

Last night Jehan had unknotted his cravat with one hand, thrown it with a loud noise of ripping silk onto the windowsill, and kicked Bahorel’s feet from under him so he’d fallen on the bed with his shirt open. To the best of his memory, by that time the hat had already been off and stowed somewhere.  
  
 _In our lifetimes,_ Prouvaire had said once to everybody, _girls like to recognize themselves in their lovers. In secret they like to envy their complexions or their ankles or their clothes, and combine those things with a few scant masculine virtues and say, here is one who is the best of me. Too much virility frightens them. Maybe centuries ago it did not, when the world resented what is feminine, but now the simple truth of it is that no matter what is in my heart a girl will look at me and think that I could break her neck by accident or scrape her cheek with my beard._  
  
 _Thus,_ Courfeyrac said, laughing and drawing out his words to be funnier, _Bahorel?_  
  
 _Thus Bahorel_ , Bahorel himself agreed, laughing with the rest of them. _I am a practiced last resort; I excel at being the final remaining option, and I am nothing like a girl._  
  
He knew -- they all did, actually -- that girls liked Prouvaire perfectly well, better than some of the rest of them in certain instances. And Prouvaire liked them back, praising their beauty and writing about their fragility and their strangeness but it was Bahorel whose shoulders he would manhandle with a laugh into bed at night, saying that the sublime is never _pretty_ , but _extraordinary_.

* * *

  
“So what is it you have built to think about,” he asked, “besides the potential for fire?”  
  
Prouvaire rolled his eyes to the ceiling, put himself back in his chair and leaned back. Bahorel saw his shoulders moving under his shirt, powerful, not suited to the conversation.  
  
“Just some flowers in candlelight,” he said. “In a quiet room. This effect is better because it is dawn. It will be spectacular again when the sun has set. During the day I won’t be here so it won’t matter.”  
  
“Are you painting _nature morte_ now? Because I’m not going in your apartment if dead peacocks turn up.”  
  
“Not so, but similar,” Jehan said. “Think of the Caravaggio -- all the fruit is rotting; it takes so long to paint. Think of Claesz, all of that has a foot on the ferry; all of it is about death. It presumes we are stupid, it overemphasizes what we all know in stillness and feel in silence: _media vita in morte sumu_.”  
  
“Well when those flowers die, your apartment will smell,” Bahorel warned him, turning his hat in lazy circles on one finger.

Jehan smiled at him, or possibly just the flowers, looking out the window and then back. “Think of what you know of hyacinth flowers -- they bloom early, they are low to the ground, they are not exceptionally decorative but very alive. And you always see them under sunlight, subject only to wind. In nature, a flower is never lit by candlelight, and we rarely look at them at dawn. Look out the window.”  
  
Bahorel stilled his hat from spinning and leaned back with a shrug. Prouvaire’s building was low on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, with no view of anything except the neighboring brickwork, but the gray morning gave the window a special opacity which made it seem like blank space. Looking back on the candle glowing behind the flowers he saw that Prouvaire had been right, of course, they were unnatural, still and golden like they were already the memory of flowers and not actually there.  
  
“Bad luck you can’t paint, hmm?” he said, and sat up straighter on the bed to keep himself from falling asleep. Whatever else was happening it was far earlier than he usually woke up.  
  
“Totally unnecessary. I just wanted to think about it, I was thinking about all of our friends and I needed to put it in these terms -- a very short bloom in a still room. Quietness, mortality. Candlelight, in spite of the sunrise.”  
  
Bahorel flopped on his back, putting his hat over his face as he laughed. “Imagine what those very same friends will say when they discover I’m being thrown over for a pitcher full of cut flowers and the makings of a small building fire.”  
  
Jehan threw an empty inkpot at him, and it missed.  
  
“Prouvaire,” he continued, putting it on the floor in case it leaked. “Men put their eyes on the ground when you take off your coat. You can walk in any notorious alley in Paris and not fear for pickpockets -- and yet here you are, you’re as innocent to cynicism as a convent girl. You’re like a miracle, or a joke. It’s not very Parisian.”  
  
“Well, I’m from the country,” said Prouvaire, like that explained it, turning his head over his shoulder to grin slowly. His beard seemed darker than it had when Bahorel first arrived, and he liked when Prouvaire let it go without shaving for a day or so. It made him even more unexpected when he said, in his quiet voice, something about flowers or Dante and Virgil balancing on the barque.  
  
Bahorel shook his head and let himself fall asleep with the hat on his eyes. In half an hour or so the bed moved, and Prouvaire was a warm and solid weight beside him.  
  
He returned to his original thesis that everyone except Jehan Prouvaire was less inspiring out of company, and amended it that perhaps he was better alone, when he did not feel like keeping his power in check with physical distance.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. I have been writing all this Vikings fic which I have decided to make all Augustine all the time so why not bleed that over. From Confessions, "They are always reading, and what they read never passes away."
> 
> 2\. Assuming J-Prouvs is obsessed with Delacroix's The Barque of Dante because that is so his speed. Inspiration for the title and some totally unfair criticism of Pieter Claesz. Claesz, don't worry about it honey you're perfect. 
> 
> 3\. "In the midst of life we are in death," from the Latin antiphon or just a common thing to say when you are a self-described poet and someone will stay still long enough to listen to you. 
> 
> 4\. Wow that is it for notes!


End file.
